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A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2012

FREDERICK BUELL
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Abstract

In opposition to energy historian Vaclav Smil, who argues that “timeless literature … show[s] no correlation with advances in energy consumption,” this essay makes the general claim that energy history is significantly entwined with cultural history. Energy history is in fact entwined with changing cultural conceptualizations and representations of psyche, body, society, and environment; it is correlated not just with changing material cultures, but with symbolic cultures as well. To see this, the essay argues, one must conceptualize energy history in terms of a succession of energy systems – systems that are constituted by sociocultural, economic, environmental, and technological relationships. The essay's specific argument then traces the effects on symbolic culture, especially literature, of the nineteenth – and twentieth-century shift from coal capitalism to oil–electric capitalism. It starts by looking at the features of early oil extraction culture, from Drake's 1859 oil strike in Titusville, Pennsylvania to Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, and examines how oil–electric capitalism develops and defines itself culturally against the previous era of coal capitalism. Then the essay considers how the consolidation of the oil–electric capitalist system is significantly related to the emergence of modernist culture, affecting the production of both popular culture and high art. By the end of the twentieth century, a new phase in oil–electric capitalism emerges with the expansion of the postwar petrochemical industry, the dramatic expansion of environmental crisis discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, and the return of peak-oil discourse to the mainstream in the last decade. The essay examines how the material features of oil, as well as its dominant uses as luminant, motor fuel, lubricant, and eventually petrochemical feedstock, take on cultural importance. Exemplifying both the cultural innovations and reinventions of oil capitalism from the extraction era to the consolidation era and the post-World War II period, the essay focusses throughout on the two recurring motifs, exuberance and catastrophe, as they play out in a wide range of literary texts and popular enthusiasms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Oil Cultures , May 2012 , pp. 273 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Smil, Vaclav, Energy in World History (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 2Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 252.

3 See the chapter entitled “Major Weather” in Bate, Jonathan, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. The closest thing I know to oxygen history is Ward's, Peter D.Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2006)Google Scholar. It is a history calibrated in million-year intervals that speculatively relates the evolution of larger brains in early hominids to rising oxygen levels on Earth and forecasts further change in 250 million years, when oxygen levels might drop. These speculations make me doubt that oxygen history will become an important theme in cultural history any time soon.

4 Catton, William R. Jr., Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 5–6Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., 28–29.

6 Ibid., 30.

7 Ibid., 6.

8 Catastrophe and exuberance are Catton's terms, but they need far more sensitive and complex descriptions than he gives them – and also need to be far more variable, specific and context-dependent. Consistently, however, the two terms interpenetrate, albeit in different fashions. For example, the term “exuberance” properly suggests a certain precariousness and even a measure of bad faith; it represents a departure from a sturdy sense of likelihood and normality. Even when used robustly, then, it is always shadowed by what fossil-fuel discourse persistently structures as its opposite partner – catastrophe. The two terms also vary for different times, places, issues, discourses, and speakers.

9 Debeir, Jean-Claude, Deléage, Jean-Paul, and Hémery, Daniel, In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization through the Ages, trans. John Barzman (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1991), 7Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., 13. A determination that is itself determined is, of course, very different from the determinisms that are regularly used to inspire or dismiss work on culture and technology, environment, and biology.

11 Ibid., 87. In looking at this break and the era that follows, one must acknowledge that both “exuberance” and “catastrophism” are cultural concomitants not just of fossil-fuel development, but also of the larger acceleration of demographic–technological–economic–social growth that the combination of fossil fuels and capitalism inaugurated. In this complex, capitalism temporally preceded fossil-fuel development, but fossil-fuel exploitation soon became arguably as fundamental.

12 Ibid., 91, 99.

13 Freese, Barbara, Coal: A Human History (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 66Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 69. The well-known domestic effects of the new coal capitalism were supplemented by coal-facilitated reorganization in the colonies. To note one concrete example: by 1826, the steam-powered gunship Diana (called the “fire devil”) entered Burmese waters, easily destroying local opposition. More important, the Indus, in 1837, sailed up into Indian rivers, and, in 1841, the Nemesis did the same in China. About this process, historian Daniel Hedrick comments: “we cannot claim that technological innovation caused imperialism, nor that imperialist motives led to technological innovation. Rather the means and the motives stimulated each other in a relationship of positive mutual feedback.” Hedrick, Daniel, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 54Google Scholar.

15 Freese, 11.

16 Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 192–93Google Scholar.

17 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an excellent (and extreme) attempt to represent and measure the stresses of this double endeavor: a destructively powerful, yet tenderly, poetically sensitive and intelligent monster is assembled mechanically out of scavenged biological parts and then galvanized (doubtless by electricity, thought by many to be the élan vital) into life.

18 Davis, Rebecca Harding, Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993; first published 1861), 13Google Scholar.

19 The Promethean myth, of course, was woven into old cultural and techno-cultural traditions; its fusion with coal came only with the invention of the steam engine. Coal's Stygian features, however, are part of an old tradition of coal as a pollutant, one that begins well before the Industrial Revolution, in medieval and Renaissance accounts of the appalling conditions in the English mines and of massive air-pollution events. Fossil fuels, moreover, lit Milton's hell, and perhaps were also implicated in its brimstone, as English coal had a very perceptible sulphur content, and fossil fuels were lively features of depictions of Hell all the way back to early Christian sources. For a general discussion, see Freese, 14–42; in Milton's Paradise Lost, see Book I, lines 725–29; for early Christian depictions of Hell, see Book 8, lines 100–6 of the Christian Sybillines in the New Testament Apocrypha, Volume II, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. Robert McLoed Wilson (Nashville, TN: James Clarke & Co., 1992).

20 In fact, the (logical) order in which I have listed these converters is misleading. Before the development of extraction techniques came experiments with refining oil and the development of lamps suited for its use as a luminant. Also before extraction, capital accumulation began and marketing was pioneered, two other crucial parts of the oil converter chain. And together with extraction, storage and transportation converters had to be immediately developed – and go through many phases, as teamsters hauling carts with barrels yielded to railroad tankers and then to pipelines.

21 Ida Tarbell, introduction to Giddens, Paul H., The Birth of the Oil Industry (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), xixGoogle Scholar.

22 Oil geography suggests fascinating homologies with psychoanalytic theory and modern cultural practice, from therapy to poetry and art. The subject lies, unfortunately, beyond the reach of this essay. The new cultural geography of the later oil system is a separate but also important and interesting topic; see footnote 29.

23 Tarbell, xxxvii–xxxviii.

24 Ibid., xxxix.

25 Giddens, The Birth of the Oil Industry, 76–7.

26 Ibid., 137, 139, 102.

27 Shah, Sonia, Crude: The Story of Oil (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 6Google Scholar. The new oil-flavored exuberance was distinctive in yet another way. No longer a Promethean intervention from above, or agent of capitalist oppression creating underworlds, energy became fused with widespread social desire. Indeed, it and the invention it stimulated and fetishized became an important attractor of peoples' imaginations and fantasies. Henry Adams's concept of history as a response to attractive, not compulsive, forces, and his use of energy production (the dynamo) as a central symbol for these was one response. More concrete was another change noted by Debeir, Déleage, and Hémery. By the twentieth century, energy production “reversed the demand–supply relation [a scarcity of supply relative to demand] which characterized early industrialization” (as indeed it had all previous energy systems). Now “energy production acquired unprecedented elasticity,” and it “anticipated demand” and even “generated new needs.” Debeir, Déleage, and Hémery, In the Servitude of Power, 108.

28 Shah, 3.

29 Oil was a new energy source, materialized as such by the growth of complex sets of converter chains; electricity was, however, simply a converter, sometimes connected to oil, sometimes to coal. But both allowed the miasmas of the coal era to be situated farther and farther away (culturally and geographically) not just from the well-to-do, but from the growing middle classes. Early observers, like Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams (1918), were well aware of this. In his famous celebration of the dynamo, Adams writes that, clean and quiet, “it would not wake the baby lying close to its frame.” Adams meaningfully explains why this is the case, noting that the dynamo utilized an “ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine house carefully kept out of sight.” Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 380Google Scholar. Jill Jonnes also emphasizes how important oil's and electricity's ability to distance or erase coal was to the very idea of modernity. Writing about the dynamo in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and Fair in Chicago, Jonnes notes that, installed for the “White City's magnificent lighting displays, [it] was powered by one great 2000-horsepower Allis Chalmers engine, as well as numerous 1000-horspower engines, all fueled with oil (supplied by Standard Oil) rather than coal.” The reason was that the display was meant to symbolize an ideal modern world displacing/replacing the miseries of actual Chicago: “The White City would have no smoky pall.” Jonnes, Jill, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 261Google Scholar. Theodore Dreiser made the same point in writing about “A Certain Oil Refinery,” a highly polluting oil facility that was banished to the hinterland of Bayonne. Theodore Dreiser, “A Certain Oil Refinery,” American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau, ed. Bill McKibben (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2008), 188–91.

30 Jacques Ellul has pithily (if androcentrically) characterized this key modern transformation as a move from “man and the machine” to “man in the machine.” Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964), 6Google Scholar.

31 Williamson, Harold, Andreano, Ralph, Daum, Arnold, and Klose, Gilbert, The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Energy 1899–1959 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 565–66Google Scholar.

32 Sinclair, Upton, Oil! (New York: Penguin, 2006; first published 1926), 6Google ScholarPubMed.

33 Ibid., 76–77.

34 Ibid., 59.

35 Ibid., 61.

36 True, this development is not wholly novel: Whitman, in his remarkable poem “To a Locomotive in Winter,” enthusiastically converted a steam engine into a new energetics for American bodies, psyches, and art. He also did the same with electricity in “I Sing the Body Electric,” absorbing a widespread romantic discourse of electricity and bodies, as Paul Gilmore discusses at length. Gilmore, Paul, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 143–76Google Scholar. Oil–electricity's revision and great expansion of both these discourses subsequently did much to constitute “the modern.”

37 Nye, David E., Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 155Google Scholar. Nye's conclusion was that “electricity was not merely one more commodity; rather it played a central role in the creation of a twentieth-century sensibility. Electricity seemed linked to the structure of social reality; it seemed both to underlie physical and psychic health and to guarantee economic progress.” Ibid., 156.

38 Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010; first published 1922), 15Google Scholar.

39 Ibid., 3, 6.

40 Hart Crane, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966), 262.

41 Alienation may be seen, I believe, as the oil-era replacement for/descendant of the exploitation and environmental immiseration of the coal-capitalist working class. Modernist alienation is clean, not miasmic; individualized, not collective, higher up on the class ladder than coal-misery; and an affliction of the refined consciousness, not of the degraded laboring body.

42 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in idem, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 23. See also Thomas Levin's introduction to the section on film, ibid., 315–22.

43 Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, The Free Press, 1991), 183Google Scholar. Curzon's rhetoric (and the tone of Yergin's title and book) are a perhaps a bit exaggerated, the former being a tribute to the wartime contribution of the American oil industry, and the latter clearly indebted to the (extraction-era) discourse of the epic of oil. Still, oil's contribution to World War I was great, and by World War II Curzon's comment would apply without qualification.

44 On the new exuberance see Kelly, Kevin, Our of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Basic Books, 1995)Google Scholar; Toffler, Alvin, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1984)Google Scholar; and Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984)Google Scholar. On its involvement with risk see Simon, Julian, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; and Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008)Google Scholar. See also the discussion of risk and the new exuberance in Buell, Frederick, From Apocalypse to Way of Life (New York: Routledge, 2005), 177–246Google Scholar.

45 See, for example, Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

46 This is the central argument of my From Apocalypse to Way of Life.

47 I include Eschbach's fiction in the list because, while it is by a German writer and has not yet been translated, it is substantially set in and influenced by reflection on US culture. Its deviation from the anglophone postapocalyptic mode is very refreshing, as it explores different post-catastrophic, post-oil futures for different societies.

48 A slightly different, but very interesting example of resistance to fused catastrophe and exuberance is Kim Stanley Robinson's global warming trilogy (Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007)). A speculative-fiction and alternative history of the present, the trilogy shoehorns attempts to deal with the first, catastrophically large disruptions of global climate into a realistic fiction of mixed subgenres. Partly Washington novels of political and scientific–political intrigue, partly suspense novels dealing with internal spying, partly romances, and partly novels of the education and growth of a large cast of interesting and likable good people dealing with domestic and personal issues, the trilogy not only confines exuberance and catastrophe within these different frames, but also manages to end in a strikingly complex fashion. On the one hand, it concludes nonexuberantly, as catastrophic climate disruptions (dramatized quite vividly) will certainly continue. On the other hand, it also concludes noncatastrophically, as the crisis is now in the hands of a good President and staff, elected in a narrow defeat of the scientifically illiterate far right candidate [Bush], even as characters' romantic and familial problems happily resolve.

49 That such fantasies are directly and/or indirectly related not just to today's culture, one dependant on oil, but to oil in its contemporary material and technologically reworked forms is, I think, clearly arguable. Today's post-biological acceleration is clearly a descendant of futurist versions of modern automotive speed, and apocalypses that have characters trudging along disused highways pushing shopping carts play both on automobile and oil-midwifed twentieth-century consumer culture. And quicktime metamophoses, while inspired by the baby steps genetic engineering has actually taken, play on the postwar reshaping of motive energy into metamorphic energy. Motive energy literally became metamorphic with the rise of post-World War II petrochemistry and its transformation of oil into so many different forms. In a different sense, motive energy also became metamorphic with more recent cultural fascination with robotics. In fact, and far more in fantasy, today's robotics has transformed the instrumental mobile machinery of modernity (for example, automobile culture) into a wide variety of lively post-biological cyborg life forms (from malign terminators operating in militarized postapocalypse to Spielbergian AI's, active in Disneyfied postapocalypse).